English Professor Named Texas State Poet Laureate

Recognized nationally as one of the most energetic, influential poets writing today, Young holds the William Livingston Chair of Poetry. He has published 12 books of poetry and one volume of prose on the aesthetics of poetry. Strongly influenced by the New York School poets, and Surrealists such as Andre Breton, Young’s poetry is full of wild leaps of illogic, extravagant imagery and mercurial shifts in tone. Using surrealist techniques like collage, Young’s poems often blur the boundaries between reality and imagination, creating a poetry that is enormously, almost disruptively, inclusive and engaging.

News and Information

Nominations Open for 2012-2013 University Co-operative Society Creative Research Award

The Vice President for Research is seeking nominations for the University Co-operative Society Creative Research Award. Nominations can be made by deans, the Provost and each vice president to whom an organized research unit reports. Each dean or vice president may submit one nominee for consideration. Eligible are tenured and tenure-track faculty, senior lecturers and lecturers, and members of the research staff (Code 1000 personnel and postdoctoral fellows).

The award comes with a certificate and $5,000. The winner will be announced at a banquet to be hosted by the University Co-operative Society in October 2013.

The nomination deadline is May 13, 2013. For more information, see the Awards, Fellowships and Grants page on the Vice President for Research website.

This award is made possible by a generous gift from the University Co-operative Society, which has made it possible for The University of Texas at Austin to recognize and reward truly outstanding creative scholarly efforts of our faculty and research staff.

Quoted-UT Researchers in the News

(A commentary quoted Terri Givens, an associate professor in the Department of Government, about a previous juncture of immigration legislation and terrorism.)

Terri Givens, an associate professor at The University of Texas with expertise in immigration policy and security, said that Republicans calling for delay have a strategy, and a precedent, in mind: the 9/11 attack. "9/11 took immigration reform off the agenda as everything switched to security," Givens said.

"President George W. Bush had been crafting a guest-worker program with Mexican President Vicente Fox," she said, "when 9/11 put Bush and Fox's plans on hold for five years. When Bush finally put forward his immigration plan in 2006, it died in the Senate the next year. Senators who mention the Boston bombing are simply being disingenuous," Givens added. "These senators and congressmen will be against or for the bill regardless."

The Cordilleran cyclicity model predicts that detachment of dense continental lithosphere should be accompanied by rapid uplift of an orogenic plateau and resulting rapid advance of deformation in the frontal fold-thrust belt.

In the central Andean plateau, recent isotopic studies argue for rapid surface uplift of the southern Altiplano in Bolivia between 16 and 13 million years ago, which has been attributed to removal of dense material at depth. The Cordilleran cyclicity model predicts that the Andean fold-thrust belt should have responded to this rapid uplift event through rapid eastward propagation of the deformation front.

However, accurate records of the timing and magnitude of deformation in the thrust belt in southern Bolivia are not available, which leaves this key prediction untested. In this project, we are performing a field-based study aimed at documenting the response (or lack thereof) of the Andean fold-thrust belt to the rapid rise of the hinterland plateau.

The Research Alert is an electronic publication from the Office of the Vice President for Research at The University of Texas at Austin. It includes news of research honors and awards, news of research programs and deadlines, researchers quoted in news media, a listing of funding opportunities and a look at a current research project. It is available by e-mail and on the Web.